Archive for the ‘Money Based Economy’ Category

Waltzing at the Doomsday Ball

Capitalism is dead, but we still dance with the corpse

By Joe Bageant
Ajijic, Jalisco, MexicoAs an Anglo European white guy from a very long line of white guys, I want to thank all the brown, black, yellow and red people for a marvelous three-century joy ride. During the past 300 years of the industrial age, as Europeans, and later as Americans, we have managed to consume infinitely more than we ever produced, thanks to colonialism, crooked deals with despotic potentates and good old gunboats and grapeshot. Yes, we have lived, and still live, extravagant lifestyles far above the rest of you. And so, my sincere thanks to all of you folks around the world working in sweatshops, or living on two bucks a day, even though you sit on vast oil deposits. And to those outside my window here in Mexico this morning, the two guys pruning the retired gringo’s hedges with what look like pocket knives, I say, keep up the good work. It’s the world’s cheap labor guys like you — the black, brown and yellow folks who take it up the shorts — who make capitalism look like it actually works. So keep on humping. Remember: We’ve got predator drones.

After twelve generations of lavish living at the expense of the rest of the world, it is understandable that citizens of the so-called developed countries have come to consider it quite normal. In fact, Americans expect it to become plusher in the future, increasingly chocked with techno gadgetry, whiz bang processed foodstuffs, automobiles, entertainments, inordinately large living spaces — forever.

We’ve had plenty of encouragement, especially in recent times. Before our hyper monetized economy metastasized, things such as housing values went through the sky, and the cost of basics, food etc. went through the basement floor, compared to the rest of the world. The game got so cheap and fast that relative fundamental value went right out the window and hasn’t been seen since. For example, it would be very difficult to make Americans understand that a loaf of bread or a dozen eggs have more inherent value than an iPhone. Yet, at ground zero of human species economics, where the only currency is the calorie, that is still true.

Such is the triumph of the money economy that nothing can be valued by any other measure, despite that nobody knows what money is worth at all these days. This is due in part to the international finance jerk-off, in which the world’s governments print truckloads of worthless money, so they can loan it out. The idea here is that incoming repayment in some other, more valuable, currency will cover their own bad paper. In turn, the debtor nations print their own bogus money to repay the loans. So you have institutions loaning money they do not have to institutions unable to repay the loans. All this is based on the bullshit theory that tangible wealth is being created by the world’s financial institutions, through interest on the debt. Money making money.

As my friend, physicist and political activist George Salzman writes,

“Everyone in these ‘professional’ institutions dealing in money lives a fundamentally dishonest life. Never mind ‘regulating’ interest rates,” he says. “We must do away with interest, with the very idea of ‘money making money’. We must recognize that what is termed ‘Western Civilization’ is in fact an anti-civilization, a global social structure of death and destruction. However, the charade of ever-increasing debt can be kept up only as long as the public remains ignorant. Once ecological limits have been reached the capitalist political game is up.”

You can see why I love this guy.

Boomers and Doomers and XXL bloomers

Capitalism wouldn’t be around today, at least not in its current pathogenic form, if it had not caught a couple of lucky breaks. The first of course, was the expansion of bloodsucking colonialism to give it transfusions of unearned wealth, enabling “investors” to profit by artificial means (death, oppression and slavery). But the biggest break was being driven to stratospheric heights by inordinate quantities of available hydrocarbon energy. Inordinate, but never the less finite. Consequently, the 100-year-long oil suckdown that put industrial countries in the tall cotton, now threatens to take back from subsequent beneficiary generation everything it gave. The Hummers, the golf courses, the big box stores, cruising at 35,000 feet over the Atlantic — everything.

You’d never know that, to look around at Americans or Canadians, who have not the slightest qualms about living in that 3,500 square foot vinyl sided fuck box, if they can manage to make the mortgage nut, or unashamedly buying a quadruple X large Raiders Jersey because, hey, a guy’s gotta eat, right? Why don’t I deserve a nice ride, a swimming pool and a flat screen? I worked for it (sure you did buddy, your $12,000 Visa/MasterCard tab is proof of that).

The doomers and the peak oilers gag, and they call it American denial. Personally, I think it is somewhat unfair to say that most Americans and Canadians are in denial. They simply don’t have a fucking clue about what is really happening to them and their world. Everything they have been taught about working, money and “quality of life” constitutes the planet’s greatest problem — overshoot. Understanding this trashes our most basic assumptions, and requires a complete reversal in contemporary thought and practice about how we live in the world. When was the last time you saw any individual, much less an entire nation, do that?

Compounding our ignorance and naiveté are the officials and experts, politicians, media elites, and especially economists, who interpret the world for us and govern the course of things. The go-to guys. They don’t know either. But they’ve got the lingo down.

Somehow or other, it all has to do with the economy, which none of us understands, despite round the clock media jabbering on the subject. Somehow it has to do with this great big spring on Wall Street called “the market” that’s gotta be kept wound up, and interest rates at something called The Fed, which have got to be kept smunched down. The industry of crystal gazing and hairball rubbing surrounding these entities is called economics.

In heaven, there are no jobs

The following may be old news to some who studied economics in college. However, I did not. And, for me at least, this gets at the heart of our dilemma (if dilemma is the right word for economic, environmental and species collapse). Here goes:

The human economy is made up of three parts: nature, work and money. But since nobody would pay people like Allen Greenspan or Milton Friedman millions of dollars if they talked just like the rest of us, economists and academics refer to these three parts as the primary, secondary and tertiary economies.

Of these, nature — the world’s ecosystems and natural capital — is by far the most important. It comprises about three quarters of the total value of economic activity (Richard Costanza et al. 1997). To western world economists, nature — when it is even give nature a thought — is considered to be limitless.

The second part, work, is the labor required to produce goods and services from natural resources. Work creates real value through efficient use of both human and natural resource energy. A potato is just a potato until people sweating over belt lines and giant fryers turn it into Tater Tots.

The third economy, the tertiary economy, is the production and exchange of money. This includes anything that can be exchanged for money, whether it is gold, or mortgages bundled as securities, or derivatives. In short, any paperwork device that can be rigged up in such a fashion that money will stick to it. Feel free to take a wild-assed guess which of the three economies causes the most grief in this world.

To an economist, work — the stuff that eats up at least a third of our earthly lives, is merely a “factor” called labor. Work is considered an unfortunate cost in creating added value. Added value, along with nature’s resources, is the basis for all real world profits. Without labor, the money economy could not gin up on-paper wealth in its virtual economy. Somewhere, somebody’s gotta do some real-world work, before bankers and investment brokers can go into their offices and pretend to work at “creating and managing wealth.”

Paying the workers in society to produce real wealth costs money. Capitalists hate any sort of cost. It represents money that has somehow escaped their coffers. So when any behemoth corporation hands out thousands of pink slips on a Friday, Wall Street cheers and “the market” goes up. No ordinary mortal has ever seen “the market.” But traders on the floor of 11 Wall Street, people who’ve deemed themselves more than mortal by virtue of their $110 Vanitas silk undershorts, assure us the market does exist. No tours of the New York Stock exchange are permitted, so we have to take their word for it.

In any case, in the money economy, eliminating costs, even if those costs happen to be feeding human beings, citizens of the empire, is sublime. That is why economists in the tertiary economy can declare a “jobless recovery” with a straight face. By their lights, the perfect recovery would necessarily be 100% jobless. Human costs of generating profit would be entirely eliminated.

Say what you will about the tertiary “money economy,” but one thing is certain. It’s virulent. Right now finance makes up 42% of GDP, and is rising. Traditionally that figure has been around 9%. Fifty eight percent of the economy is “services.” When it comes to the service economy, most people think of fried chicken buckets and “customer service,” call centers harassing debtors or selling credit cards. However, much of the so-called service economy consists of “services” sub-corporations and entities owned and operated by monopolies in communications, electronic access and energy. They are designed for the sole purpose of robbing the people incrementally. Borrow a microscope and read the back side your cable and electric bill. Billing you is a “service” for which you pay. So is the guy who cuts off your lights if you don’t.

And manufacturing? Ten percent. Mostly big ticket items such as salad shooters, as near as I can tell.

What nature?

Still though, the foundation of the world, including our entire economic structure, is nature. This is clear to anyone who has ever, planted a garden, hiked in the woods, gone fishing or been gnawed on by chiggers. In vis est exordium quod terminus.

Yet, not one in a thousand economists takes nature into account. Nature has no place in contemporary economics, or the economic policy of today’s industrial nations. Again, like the general American public, these economists are not in denial. They simply don’t know it’s there. Historically, nature has never been considered even momentarily because economists, like the public, never figured they would run out of it. With the Gulf oil “spill” at full throttle, the terrible destruction of nature is becoming obvious. But no economist who values his or her career wants to start figuring the cost of ecocide into pricing analysis. For god sake man, it’s a cost!

With industrial society chewing the ass out of Mama Nature for three centuries, something had to give, and it has. Capitalists, however, remain unimpressed by global warming, or melting polar ice caps, or Southwestern desert armadillos showing up in Canada, or hurricanes getting bigger and more numerous every year. They are impressed by the potential dough in the so-called green economy. In fact, last night I watched an economist on CNN say that if the government had let the free market take care of the BP gulf catastrophe, it would not be the clusterfuck it is now. Now THAT might qualify as denial. In the mean time, anthropogenic ecocide and resource depletion, coupled with the pressures of six billion mouths and asses across the globe, have started to produce — surprise surprise, Sheriff Taylor! — very real effects on world economies. (How could they not?) So far though, in the simplistic see-spot-run American mind, it’s all about dead pelicans and oiled up hotel beaches.

Monkey with the paper

When the U.S., and then the world’s money economy started to crumble, the first thing capitalist economists could think of to do was to monkey with the paper. That’s all they knew how to do. It was unthinkable that the tertiary virtual economy, that great backroom fraud of debt manipulation and fiat money, might have finally reached the limits of the material earth to support. That the money economy’s gaming of workers and Mother Nature might itself might be the problem never occurred to the world’s economic movers and shakers. It still hasn’t. (Except for Chavez, Morales, Castro and Lula). Jobs disappeared, homes went to foreclosure, and personal debt was at staggering all time highs. America’s working folks were taking it square in the face. Not that economists or financial kingpins cared much one way or the other. In the capitalist financial world, everything is an opportunity. Cancer? Build cancer hospital chains. Pollution? Sell pollution credits. The country gone bankrupt?

“Nothing to do,” cried the mad hatters of finance, “but print more money, and give gobs of cash to the banks! Yes, yes, yes! Borrow astronomical amounts of the stuff and bribe every fat cat financial corporation up and down The Street!” All of which came down to creating more debt for the common people to work off. They seem willing enough to do it too — if only they had jobs.

Along with the EU, Japan and the rest of the industrial world, the US continues to flood the market with cheap credit. That would be hunky dory, if was actually wealth for anybody but a banker. The real problems are debt and fraud, and tripling the debt in order to cover up the fraud. And pretending there no natural costs of our actions, that we do not have to rob the natural world to crank up the money world through debt.

No matter what economists tell us abut getting the credit industry moving again, papering over debt with more debt will not pollinate our food crops when the last honeybee is dead. I suggest that we put the economists out there in the fields, hand-pollinating crops like they do in China. They seem to know all about the subject, and have placed a monetary value of $12 billion on the pollination accomplished by bees in the US. Can you imagine the fucking arrogance? All bees do is make our fruit and vegetable supply possible. Anyway, if we cannot use the economists for pollinators (odds are they are too damned whacked to do that job), we could also stuff them down the blowhole of the Deepwater Horizon spill. For the first time in history, economists would be visibly useful.

Speaking of China: Since there is no way to pick up the turd of American capitalism by the clean end, much less polish it, American economists have pointed east, and set up a yow-yow about China as “the emerging giant.” The “next global industrial superpower.” Many Chinese are willing to ride their bicycles 10 miles to work through poisonous yellow-green air, and others in the “emerging middle class” are willing to wade into debt up to their nipples; this is offered as evidence of the viability of industrial capitalism. All it proves is that governments and economists never learn. In the quest of getting something for nothing, China follows the previous fools right into the smog and off the cliff.

Sumthin’ fer nuthin’

The main feature of capitalism is the seductive assertion that you can get something for nothing in this world. That you can manufacture wealth through money manipulation, and that it is OK to steal and hold captive the people’s medium of exchange, then charge them out the ass for access. That you can do so with a clear conscience. Which you can, if you are the kind of sleazy prick who has inherited or stolen enough wealth to get into the game.

Even so, to keep a rigged game going, you must keep the suckers believing they can, and eventually will, benefit from the game. Also, that it is the only game in town. Legitimizing public theft means indoctrinating the public with all sorts of market mystique and hocus-pocus. They must be convinced there is is such a thing as an “investment” for the average schmuck drawing a paycheck (and there is, sort of, between the crashes and the bubbles). It requires a unified economic rationale for government and industry policies, and it is the economist’s job to pump out this rationale. Historically, they have seldom hesitated to get down on their knees and do so.

It ain’t robbery, it’s a business cycle

Capitalism is about one thing: aggregating the surplus productive value of the public for private interests. As we have said, it is about creating state sanctioned “investments” for the workers who produce the real wealth. Things like home “ownership” and mortgages, or stock investments and funds to absorb their retirement savings. That crushing 30-year mortgage with two refis is an investment. So is that 401K melting like a snow cone the beach.

As the people’s wealth accumulates, it is steadily siphoned off by government and elite private forces. From time to time, it is openly plundered for their benefit by way of various bubbles, depressions or recessions and other forms of theft passed off as unavoidable acts of nature/god. These periodic raids and draw downs of the people’s wealth are attributed to “business cycles.” Past periodic raids and thefts are heralded as being proof of the rationale. “See folks, it comes and goes, so it’s a cycle!” Economic raids and busts become “market adjustments.” Public blackmail and plundering through bailouts become a “necessary rescue packages.” Giveaways to corporations under the guise of public works and creating employment become “stimulus.” The chief responsibility of economists is to name things in accordance with government and corporate interests. The function of the public is to acquire debt and maintain “consumer confidence.” When the public staggers to its feet again and manages to carry more debt, buy more poker chips on credit to play again, it’s called a recovery. They are back in the game.

Dealer, hit me with two more cards,. I feel lucky.

Does it hurt yet?

To anyone who is paying attention, things look doomed. Fortunately for American capitalism, nobody is paying attention. They never have. Even given the unemployment numbers, foreclosures and bankruptcies, most Americans are still not feeling enough pain yet to demand change. Not that they will. Demand change, I mean. We haven’t the slightest idea of any other options, outside those provided by the corporate managed state. So in a chorus well-schooled by the media the public demands “reform,” of the present system, the systemic pathogenic system based on exploitation of the many by the few, the one presently eating our society from the inside out. How do you reform that?

We are clueless, and the state sees to it that we stay that way. Take the price of gas, about which Americans are obsessive. In one way or another, petroleum is the subject of much news coverage, nearly as much as pissing matches between egomaniacs in Hollywood or o Capitol Hill. So one might think that by now Americans would have a realistic grasp of the petroleum business and things like oil and gasoline prices.

Hah, think again! This is America, this is Strawberry Fields, where nothing is real and the skies are not cloudy all day. We’re stewed in a consumer hallucination called the American Dream and riding a digital virtual money economy nobody can even prove exists.

Is there an economy out there or not?

If we decide to believe the money economy still exists, and that debt is indeed wealth, then we damned sure know where to go looking for the wealth. Globally, forty percent of it is in the paws of the wealthiest one percent. Nearly all of that one percent are connected to the largest and richest corporations. Just before the economy blew out, these elites held slightly less than $80 trillion. After the blowout/bailout, their combined investment wealth was estimated at a little over $83 trillion. To give some idea, this is four years of the gross output of all the human beings on earth. It is only logical that these elites say the only way to revive the economy, which to them consists entirely of the money economy, is to continue to borrow money from them.
However, the unasked question still hangs in the air: Does the money economy even exist anymore? Is it still there? (was it ever?) Or are we all blindly going through the motions because:

A: we do not understand that, for all practical historical purposes, it’s over;

B: we do not know how to do anything else so we keep dancing with the corpse of the hyper-capitalist economy;

C: the right calamity has not come down the pike to knock us loose from the spell of the dance,

or D: we’re so friggin brain dead, commodities engorged and internally colonized by capitalist industrialism that nobody cares, and therefore it no longer matters.

This is multiple choice, and it counts ten points toward survival, come the collapse.

If there is no economy left, what the hell are we all participating in? A mirage? The zombie ball? The short answer is: Because the economy is a belief system, you are participating in whatever you believe you are. Personally, I believe we are participating in a modern extension of the feudal system, with bankers as the new feudal barons and credit demographics as their turf. But then, I drink and take drugs. Whatever it is, the money economy is the only game in town until the collapse, after which chickens and firewood may become the national currency. The Masai use cattle don’t they?

At the same time, even dumb people are starting to feel an undefined fear in their bones. When I was back in the States last month, an old high school chum, a sluggard who seldom has forward thought beyond the next beer and Lotto scratch ticket, confides in me:

“Joey, I can’t shake the feeling that something big and awful is going to happen. And by awful I mean awful.”

“Happen to what?”

“Money, work, our country. Shit, I dunno.”

“Probably all three,” I opined. “Plus the environment.”

“Cheerful fuck, ain’t ya?”

“That’s what they pay me for, Bubba.”

Some in the herd are starting to feel a big chill in the air, the first winds of the approaching storm. Yes, something is happening, and you don’t know what it is, dooooo yew, Mistah Jones?

However, the most adept economists and other court sorcerers are going along as if nothing too unusual is happening — calling it a recession, or more recently a double-dip recession (don’t you love these turd-balls, making it sound as harmless as an ice cream cone — gimme a double dip please!) or even a depression. But no matter what it is, they smugly assure us, there is nothing happening that the world has never seen before. Including the insider scams that ignited the catastrophe. It’s just a matter of size. Extent.

OK, it’s a matter of scale. Like the Gulf oil spill. We’ve seen spills before, just not this big. But over the next couple of years as the poison crud circulates the world’s oceans, the Deep Horizon spill will prove to be a global game changer, whether economists and court wizards acknowledge it or don’t. Anything of global scale, whether it is in finance, energy, foreign aid, world health or war contracting, is accompanied by unimaginable complexity. That makes it perfect cover for criminal activity. Particularly finance, where you are always close to the money.

Jim Kunstler, never at a loss to describe a ludicrous situation, sums up the paper economy’s engineering of our collapse nicely:

“Wall Street — in particular the biggest ‘banks’ — packaged up and sold enough swindles to unwind 2500 years of western civilization. You simply cannot imagine the amount of bad financial paper out there right now in every vault and portfolio on the planet … the people fabricating things like synthetic collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) had no idea what the fuck they were doing — besides deliberately creating documents that nobody would ever understand, that would never be unraveled by teams of law clerks … and were guaranteed to place in jeopardy every operation of the world economy above the barter level.”

Phew!

So, for $5,000 and an all expense paid trip to Rio: What does a good capitalist do after having stolen all there is to steal from the living, then stolen the nation’s future wealth from the unborn through debt both public and private?

Tick tock, tick tock. The wheel spins.

Blaaaaaamp!

“Your answer please.”

“A good capitalist would ‘invest’ his haul in some other racket, some other scam in the money economy.”

“Vanna, a pie in the kisser for this guy, please.”

The problem with the answer is that economy is now toxed out. Radioactive. Crawling with paper vermin and all manner of vermin, especially toxic derivatives — about $1.4 quadrillion worth (even as we are still trying to get used to hearing the term trillions), according to the Bank of National Settlements. That is 1,000 trillion, or $190,000 for every human being on the planet. There is not now, and never will be, enough wealth to cover that puppy — because there is not enough natural world under the puppy to create it. Not the way capitalism creates wealth.

Defenders of capitalism who say it can and must be saved must also admit that there is not enough money left to work with, to invest. There is only debt. Oh, yeah, we forgot; debt is wealth to a banker. Well then, all we gotta do is collect $190,000 per head from people in Sudan and Haiti and the rest of the planet.

Naw, that’s too hard. Elite capital’s best bet is a good old fashioned money raid on the serfs; create another bubble that will buy enough time before it pops to make the already rich a few billion richer. To that end, the G-8 is blowing one last bounder out there in the hyperspace where the economy s alleged to be surviving. Naturally, they are doing it in order to “save the world economy.” The tough part is figuring out what to base the next bubble on.

May I suggest Soylent Green?

Under God, with fees and compound interest for all

From the outset, capitalism was always about the theft of the people’s sustenance. It was bound to lead to the ultimate theft — the final looting of the source of their sustenance — nature. Now that capitalism has eaten its own seed corn, the show is just about over, with the nastiest scenes yet to play out around water, carbon energy (or anything that expends energy), soil and oxygen. For the near future however, it will continue to play out around money.

As the economy slowly implodes, money will become more volatile stuff than it already is. The value and availability of money is sure to fluctuate wildly. Most people don’t have the luxury of escaping the money economy, so they will be held hostage and milked hard again by the same people who just drained them in the bailouts. As usual, the government will be right there to see that everybody plays by the rules. Those who have always benefited by capitalism’s rules will benefit more. That cadre of “money professionals” which holds captive the nation’s money supply, and runs things according to the rules of money, can never lose money. It writes the rules. And rewrites them when it suits the money elite’s interests. Capitalism, the Christian god, democracy, the Constitution.

It’s all one ball of wax, one set of rules in the American national psyche. Thus, the money masters behind the curtain will write The New Rules, the new tablets of supreme law, and call them Reform. There will be rejoicing that “the will of the people” has once again moved upon the land, and that the democracy’s scripture has once again been delivered by the unseen hand of God.

—————

Joe Bageant is the author of Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War. His newest book, Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir, deals with America’s permanent white underclass, and how it was intentionally created. To be released in September in Australia and October in the United Kingdom. Rainbow Pie is available for preorder from Amazon-UK and Amazon-Canada. In Australia, the book can be pre-ordered at Scribe Publications.

(This is a copy of an email I received today from NIA. Of note: there are currently 40+ unoccupied homes for every “homeless” person in America. NIA helps explain why…)

Tue, July 6, 2010 2:15:51 PM

U.S. Austerity Necessary to Prevent Hyperinflation

U.S. Austerity Necessary to Prevent Hyperinflation

In NIA’s latest economic documentary ‘Meltup’, we said that the simple act of the U.S. government eliminating its $7.25 per hour minimum wage and implementing a new $7.25 per hour maximum wage for government employees, would go a long way in helping rebalance America’s unstable economy. NIA is very pleased that California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger appears to have watched Meltup. Schwarzenegger last week announced plans to cut pay for over 200,000 state employees down to the minimum wage of $7.25 per hour due to a budget impasse.

Although most expect these salaries to rise back up after California passes a new budget, NIA believes the only way California will be able to survive without a bailout from the Federal Government, is if these wage cuts are made permanent. In fact, if the U.S. government wants to have any hope of preventing and/or delaying hyperinflation from occurring by the year 2015, we believe the Federal Government will need to implement similar wage cuts on a nationwide basis within the next 24 to 36 months.

Both the U.S. dollar and Euro experienced a decline in their share of the world’s foreign-exchange reserves during the first quarter of 2010. Meanwhile, central banks reported a 19% increase in the “other currencies” category, which includes currencies like the Canadian dollar and Australian dollar. While many European countries are now making the right choice of implementing tough austerity cuts to counteract weakening demand for Euros, there have been no calls for major austerity cuts in the United States. Before long, NIA expects short-term confidence in the Euro to be restored, which could turn the U.S. dollar short-term bounce into a huge crash, exactly like NIA predicted in its top 10 predictions for 2010.

The U.S. is currently in a death spiral of accelerating national debt growth, endless deficits, and soon to be skyrocketing interest rates and massive price inflation. Beginning in late-2010/early-2011 as confidence is restored in the Euro and the spotlight is put on the U.S. debt crisis, NIA expects to see a dramatic rush out of the U.S. dollar that will accelerate going into 2012. A select group of educated Americans who reach the exit door first will become the wealthiest Americans of the future, while the rest of the country sees the purchasing powerof their savings disappear.

Despite what the U.S. government would have you believe, deflation is a good thing. Our country was able to survive the Great Depression of the 1930s because we were lucky enough to have across the board price deflation. Shockingly, even back then the U.S. government took unprecedented measures in order to battle some areas of price deflation, which NIA believes prolonged the Great Depression.

During the Great Depression, the U.S. was faced with overproduction of agricultural commodities due to technological advances made during the Roaring Twenties. The one problem no American should have had at that time was finding food to eat. However, rather than let Americans eat cheap food, our government compounded problems by enacting the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which paid farmers to destroy their crops in an attempt to artificially raise agriculture prices. This led to millions of Americans overpaying for food and nearly starving to death.

The one problem no American should have today is finding shelter. The agriculture overproduction during the early years of the Great Depression pales in comparison to the overproduction of new homes the U.S. experienced this past decade. Rather than let Americans enjoy affordable housing, the U.S. government once again implemented wasteful policies such as the $8,000 home buyer tax credit in an attempt to artificially prop housing prices up. There are now hundreds of thousands of Americans who are “squatting” in homes, by occupying homes they neither own, rent or have permission to use.

Deflation is good for all Americans because it increases the purchasing power of their U.S. dollars. There were no good reasons for Americans to have gone without food during the Great Depression and to be squatting in homes today. These problems were created as a direct result of the government’s interference in the free market, as part of their ill-conceived war against deflation. If the government simply got out of the way, food would have been affordable for all Americans during the Great Depression and housing would be affordable for all Americans today.

NIA believes it is important for the government to also get out of the way when it comes to wage controls. NIA frequently tells young people that the best way to start a successful career in the U.S. is not by getting deeply into debt to attend college, but by immediately entering the workforce and gaining first hand knowledge and experience. Without a minimum wage, a recent high school graduate who wants to start a career in the oil drilling industry, could write letters to the CEOs of oil drilling companies offering his/her services for just $5 per hour. Under current labor laws, this would be illegal, even though the high school graduate would be receiving an education that is far superior to what he/she would receive in college.

NIA’s biggest fear is that the U.S. government will implement price controls during hyperinflation, by ordering stores to sell goods at government mandated prices. A couple months ago while NIA was producing Meltup, an event took place just outside of a major U.S. city that demonstrates just how devastating price controls will be on the lives of all Americans during hyperinflation. This story was largely ignored by the mainstream media, but NIA is currently producing a video that will expose the significance of what took place inside of our very own country. We will be releasing this shocking video later this month.

Please continue to spread the word about NIA by telling your friends and family to subscribe for free at: http://inflation.us

I just returned a month ago from a seven weeks trip to the Middle East, mainly in Jerusalem where I volunteered to anchor some very High energies inside of the Earth Mother’s “navel” energy portal which keeps Her connecting directly to the Highest levels of the One.

A female individual was also involved and did greatly assist in this process.

The operation was quite arduous, highly complex and involved, and quite risky.

I am happy to say that it was in great parts a success. I may share more about it in a future communication.

I am still resting for a while, needing to rebuild and consolidate.

I have written for over 10 years about our misguided choice in choosing dark gold oil energy as our prime energy source. All I can do is warn and hope for a shift.

I have great news to share: a new birthing is on its way, and as with any birth and the end of pregnancy, the process is altogether quite painful and difficult, often laden with anxiety, but Divinely Glorious at the same time.

Take some deep breaths and try to relax, as you are parts of the new baby, men and women alike.

A new world, a new Creation, is in the birth canal of the Divine Mother, seeded and blessed by the Holy Father, and we are ALL involved, knowingly and willingly so, or unknowingly, in this process. Soon we will emerge out of this arduous journey inside this dark tunnel.

If you live in FL or any of the Southern coastal US states, it may be a very good idea to seriously consider relocating for a couple of years. You will know when and if it is safe to return, if such is your desire.

You should have about a year, to maybe a year and a half, at the most, before things might really get harsh.

Much devastation to nature’s bounty and the economical stability of our planet is likely to unfold.

Soon, all this dark toxic oil being released near the mouth of the Gulf stream will be sucked into it, and start spreading its tentacles of death world-wide. Large populations will commensurately begin to choke on polluted volatile and potentially flammable gases and find themselves de-energized due to greatly reduced levels of our primary source of life: oxygen, as large amounts of methane gas escaping from the crust fissure circulate in the ocean choking the oxygen levels, and much oxygen-producing phytoplankton and algae dies causing vast oceanic areas to likely turn into gigantic dead zones void of life. Our oceans produce between 71 to 80 percent of all oxygen on earth. They are literally our life-source. Our food chain will thence also be drastically affected and reduced.

Do not think for a moment that what has and is being done to Mother Nature will not affect us all in return.

As She gets drained of life energy, so are we, and so shall we. We are but One with Her.

As She gets fractured and broken, so shall we.

What within, so without. What without, so within, for all is One’s expression.

If you feel lacking life energy and deeply tensed lately, you are not having somatic problems. Rather, this is the reason why.

The amount of damage this oil leak will cause, will be inversely proportionate to our ability to rise to the occasion and challenge. How soon or how late we will see the rise of hope and solace will depend on the intensity with which we will engage, as one international human family, in the global consciousness quantum shift required and the degree of sincere great desire to change forever our unhealthy current living habits.

We will need to get off our deeply imbedded suicidal addictions to dark oil and raw greed, once and for all, and fast so.

No one will remain safe nor privileged anymore, unless he/she asks for Divine intervention and inner purification, not only within separative human tinted spiritual structures, but especially inside of his/hers purest center of heart, where the un-named original Light Source resides.

No one will remain safe, nor privileged, unless one shows, UNCONDITIONALLY so, to any living thing across, a level of great love, concern, and desire to share in whatever bounty the Great Mother and Her Beloved: the Divine Father, are still willing to gift to their human children.

None will remain within ivory towers of elitist lifestyles based on economical, geographical, or belief systems status, whilst turning an egoistic blind eye to the surrounding oceans of refuse, misery, pain, poisonous substances and waste they have either caused or allowed to spread.

These towering structures will either decide, on their own, to transmute or crumble down, as mankind opens its heart, or they will be made to do so – Divinely so.

The fractures opened inside the deep inner crust of the earth and leaking now, will, most likely, only close themselves when the fractures we have caused within our human family and towards our living Upper Divine Mother: Mother Nature Herself, are sealed and patched by a common human decision to fundamentally change our approach to life and show respect and real care towards our common Creator and His/Her Creation.

This is where the fundamental difference lies between real worshipping of the One Spirit: Our Creator and Its Creation, and false altered human distortions operating amongst ourselves, bent more on rituals and less on substance. We all need to rejoin our common Source: The One Supreme Being, and source all of our actions from that vista of Oneness.

All human technical attempts to close this leaking fracture in the Gulf will, most probably, be proven futile, as it is but a major change in human consciousness that is required.

Do not think for a minute that what has happened is purely an act of man and can only be corrected by such, for the Godliness has been intensely involved in it and is monitoring this situation with great concentration and undivided attention.

It is this very awareness, and our responses to this realization, that will either attenuate the rigor of the upcoming events or make them harsher.

There will be no abating until each and every single individual in humanity is totally and unequivocally convinced that the Creator Himself is directly involved and sending us messages and warnings, so as to direct us onto better life-changing paths.

This Gulf oil event is a profound and hard lesson to all of mankind, and the quality of our reactions to it will make the Godliness either correct the leak by stopping the outflow on its own, or letting it pour out for as long as is necessary, and from as many locations as need be.

So many beautiful marine animals are in the process of dying and many more will in the future. MarineCetaceans who are Highly Intelligent Guardian Beings are willingly offering to sacrifice their lives in order to teach their Human brethrens a lesson of Love. Let’s not allow their tragic and painful deaths to have been in vain, please, not again…

In human history, many special individuals and groupings of people have acted as sacrificial scapegoats going to horrific deaths, in order to enlivened compassion and a sense of unity across all nations. Now the natural world is doing the same. Sadly, until now, not very much has been accomplished to awaken the harden heart and spirit of mankind.

Let me state it as it is: The great Divine shift is on this time, with the full attention of the Divine. Please awaken and admit to that Reality.

If most do not recognize this and try to understand the deep meaning of the lesson, many even more dramatic events will manifest, until there remains not a shadow of doubt within Humanity that the One Himself is involved in correcting and saving His Creation.

Many individuals, or groupings thereof, have swam in the mistaken belief – because of their perceptual belonging to a spiritual “elected’ and elitist grouping of common belief programs, usually originating from their birth culture or sometimes espoused after some soul-searching – that they will mysteriously ascend and be “miraculously” taken to other dimensions, planetary systems, or realities. Even eternal life in their current embodiment and restricted minds is contemplated in the human format.

Let me state firmly that all this is pure falsehood, embedded by power hungry individuals and groupings who have used the spreading of such illusions in order to offer false hopes and affect control over ignorant masses. No one has been able to return from the “other side” to gift fundamental proof of such, short of using human quackery.

The One Spirit is One and this Creation is One within Itslef. All Its multiple dimensions, whether nature or otherwise, are One, and every one affect all others, in the same way as we, humans, affect each other. The multi-universe of parallel universes exists. It is Real. However, it is One, and, as such, separated into regions, sections, parts, all intertwined, all influencing each other.

The process engaged here is affecting not only this world, but a great amount of other worlds, for all is One and soon to be proven so, across all realities in this multi-UNI-verse of the One.

This process of unification is Universal now. There shall be no other paradise, short of an earthly paradise manifest and regained here, everywhere, with Divine intervention. There shall be no hell, short of an earthly hell made manifest here, everywhere, without the help of Divine Intervention. Our free-will choices of levels of Loving awareness will decide whether we, as a family, experience Glorious paradise or a living man-made hell in the here, in the now.

All that will happen, lies within our present and future choices that we take from now thenceforth.

The Earth is a Living conscious Godly Being, as stated in the first verse of Genesis, and our flagrant disrespect for Her is what has caused these events and many more upcoming reactions.

We have raped, pillaged, poisoned, and laid to waste large tracks of Her magnificent beauty and Perfection. She was Created in Pure unconditional Love by Pure Unconditional Love. We, humans, have, in turn, left Her with memories of wasted dreams, pain, lust, misery, and grief, as our blood and souls have returned back into her veins, haunting her inner Gigantic Higher Soul.

She has tried to keep this flowing darkness from her magnificent inner core, through keeping it between Her inner mantle and Her absorbing solid crusted surface layers. She was originally Created with the ability to transmute our darkness slowly back into Pure energy.

But we, in our folly, and unconscious extremely restricted awareness, blinded by temporary lust for power, had decided to extract back that very same dark energy, project it back above, and breathe it back into us in the name of a spiritual devolution which we call technological material progress.

We did not allow for her built-in Divine, deep below earth, surface, and atmospheric, cleansing processes to function. We overwhelmed them rapidly, without regards.

So that, as we poisoned Her waters, soils, uprooted Her life producing trees and released sooth and toxic waste poisons into Her environment, She slowly had to stop Her cleansing operations, for She was unable to do so anymore.

And, wailing over Her children who had lost their ways, She called upon Her Divine Lover: the One Himself, to come to Her aid and try to save Her and, in that process, save Her children, present and future ones.

The One thence responded and embraced His Daughter in a Loving embrace and is now engaged fully in this last minute Life-rescue operation.

For the One Himself is the only real Savior possible which so many have been waiting for, for so long.

No one else can, no one else should, and no one else will.

All the events happening from now on are under the One’s control and show His firm Loving Hand as He acts directly upon this plane.

Please, do respond to this call to engage back into sanity and Love. Disconnect from false leaders, false prophets, and false stories. They are all around you and within you, polluting evermore your environment and abilities to think and respond.

Truth is Eternal and un-named, it just IS. It encompasses all names and lies far beyond. It is the IS that Has Been and shall Be.

The One is talking to you directly, through His Beloved Wife at the level of His direct on-line live manifestations: The Holy Level of Nature, which the Divine Mother keeps vibrating and energizing within Her immense Mind. All the natural events that you experience are Her messages of Love and Her attempts to save this world.

Man will not be anymore the sole controller of bounty, and distribute it, based on human power structures. You will all understand and experience this soon, intensely so.

You will be powerless to oppose this cosmic planetary realization and shift originating from Pure unbiased Love.

Whatever plans some humans have assiduously prepared and plotted at lengths in order to seize control over other groupings or nations, often with the help of misguided spiritual forces, are starting to and will evermore be proven to be totally worthless and come to naught.

Their power is not even equivalent to a grain of sand at the bottom of a gigantic ocean when compared to the potentially infinite Force the One can muster with Its Will.

Great and even more traumatizing events are about to unfold in the next months and years.

Get prepared, and do an internal and external cleansing. Focus all your attention on this.

Learn to travel light, and to only travel in LIGHT.

Let go of the programs and systems of operations bent on dark restricted awareness. It only burdens you.

This is a lesson to humanity that we cannot escape, no matter where we try to hide, as we are finding ourselves utterly unable to stop the dark energy of death from spreading.

We could have chosen the Loving energy of freely gifted Light/Life energy: the Sun energy and its electrical manifestation in the ionosphere, to help energize our lives and behavior, without any poisoning activity whatsoever. Instead, centuries ago, we chose the polluting energy of deep and sticky dark energy both spiritually and materially; an energy which should have remained where it is needed the most and serves a very important purpose: inside of the earth, in the underworld. Instead we choose to extract it to the surface of our earth and our consciousness.

Soon this dark energy began altering our faculties of conscious discernment and polluting all of our sky and our inner beings. We started to literally swim and breathe in an ocean of its by-products, becoming slowly mutated, while falling into its cruel grip and poisoned by its presence, even at the Holy DNA level.

The lure for dark oil was the cause for the establishment of dangerously aggressive transnational power structures, and brought about the carving of newly established co-operative nations and kingdoms whose gigantic wealth and power would principally derive from dark energy exploitation. Soon the effects of what had been created were boomeranging back towards all of us haunting our very survival, as is already being shown both in the Gulf spill event, in terror events addressed at the Western world, and in the Middle East conflict, which may be about to potentially explode again soon and spill out much angry and violent dark human energy.

Only a real quantum jump of awareness in the realization of our Unity in One and that we, humans, are truly an interconnected global family, can avoid any new fractures to occur either between ourselves or across the earth’s crust. The Gulf spill is here to painfully help us realize our common planetary global fate in Life or in Death.

We have polluted our inner being with dark behaviors and dark thoughts filled with egoism and yearning for power. We have polluted our entire outer environment with dark energy and its by-products, poisoning most of life-forms around us.

What goes around, comes around to haunt you later, and teach you the only Divine lesson there is and can be: The Lesson of Love.

Everything is a circle; the Everything is a Sphere.

That is the path we have chosen, as a creation, for Millennia, to satiate our uncontrolled desire for ego-based power.

Not only is the great ocean threatened by death, but so are we, for we are One with It, and originate from One.

We are all at risk of dying a slow and painful death unless we all unite across all mental and physical borders, change our ways, and ask for help and guidance from the One Creator.

Do not stay in denial much more. Enjoy all that you can. Be kind to each other and yourselves, and constantly express love to all that you possibly can in a Divine act of re-unification and compassion, across all barriers, across all old pains.

Connect more to nature and its beauty. Energize Her while you can. Hug her animals and hug all the humans who come your way. Forgive, and forget old wounds, so that you can open yourself to a new world that may manifest soon, only through direct Divine intervention, if and when we are ready.

Only the One will decide what will unfold and what shall be avoided, by His Will.

Gerald O’Donnell. All Rights Reserved. No part of this material may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or otherwise, for commercial purposes, without the written permission of the author, except when permitted by law.

(Note: This article taken from the Media section of Kabbalah.info, website of the Bnei Baruch Education and Research Institute. Go to kabbalah.info to sign up for free, online, live interactive lessons.)

We are more than a year and a half into the largest financial crisis since the Great Depression and it seems as if the long wished for solution is still far away. As we observe governments struggling to contain this financial crisis by injecting huge amounts of money into the economies of their respective countries, one cannot prevent oneself from asking the simple question: isn’t there another way?

Well, actually there is. But it can be taken only if we’ll allow ourselves to look at things from a different perspective.

First things first: Don’t let the words “sub-prime crisis” mislead you. The sub-prime market is not the reason for the collapse; it is only where the financial crisis surfaced. It could just as easily have been the “environmental crisis” or the “humanitarian crisis,” or even the “nuclear proliferation crisis.” What really started this snowball rolling was not a financial body of any kind, but rather avarice, uncivilized lust and irresponsible opportunism, or simply said, the self-centered nature of humans. The only reason it hit the monetary system first is that this system embodies the corrupt nature of people’s relationships and interconnections.

Unfortunately, this nature cannot be changed by pouring absurd amounts of taxpayers’ money into the markets. So far, the trillions spent in the United States, England, France, and elsewhere have increased neither the lending nor the liquidity. It was all done so recklessly that now no one can get the bailed-out companies and banks to admit what they’ve spent the money on. Those trillions disappeared, just like the billions that slipped through the hands of the big billionaires.

Money didn’t cause the financial crisis and money won’t fix it. To cope with today’s financial and social challenges, a completely different bailout plan is needed – a plan that bails us out of our own self-centered ways.

A Financial Crisis of Trust

Everyone uses the expression, “the stock markets tumbled,” but does anyone even know what this phrase really means? The stock market is, after all, nothing more than a conglomeration of estimations and speculations: a sophisticated platform for successful bets and extrapolations that are immediately translated into rates and indexes. So the stock market is not what collapsed. What really collapsed is the trust between people. Credit companies distrust the insurance companies, which lack confidence in the banks, which were disappointed with the real estate agents, who blame the insurance agents for causing the fall of the average Joe, who was forced, as usual, to pay for all of this… big time! And as if all that isn’t enough, along came ‘Madoff’s Ponzi Scheme‘ and shattered whatever trust we had left in the system.

Now, everyone is carefully holding their cards close to their chests, stashing their money back where it used to be in the good old days – under the floor tiles. This is why the seemingly endless spouting of capital has dried up and created what the self-proclaimed mavens refer to as “a liquidity crisis.”

Now hold tight. Despite all the above-written, all is not lost. Things are actually improving. Why? Because that same trust that appears to be broken was never really there. It was no more than an illusion, which is the real bubble that burst. The situation where everyone is concerned only with personal profits is what brought us to this financial crisis in the first place. Also, if real trust is nowhere to be found in the world, it’s better to discover it now, before it is really too late.

But, this is only the tip of the iceberg. The real bonus that comes with this crisis is that now we are ready to see the world for what it is: one global boat.

Two people were in a boat, and one of them took a drill and began to drill a hole beneath himself. His companion said to him: Why are you doing this? He replied: What concern is it of yours? Am I not drilling under myself? The other replied: But you will flood the boat for us both, and we will both sink. (Kabbalist Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, Midrash Raba, Leviticus 4:6)

In the global boat we all share, whoever thinks he can drill a hole under his or her own seat and ignore the well being of others is gravely mistaken. The brokers and investors who believed that only their clients would be harmed if their gambles failed are now plowing the deep water along with everyone else. And by everyone I mean “everyone,” from the Hypo Real Estate Bank in Berlin and the AIG in New York, to the Chai Ling Shiu and Sons Inc. shoe store in North Thailand. If one person drowns, everyone drowns right along with him.

Why is it so important for us to understand this? It is because we live in a new reality, a reality where we all depend on one another, for better or for worse. From now on, we have no choice but to work together, as one big family. Only then will we be able to navigate our global ship through this winter of our hardship toward the haven of bounty and prosperity.

One of the reasons it is so challenging to envision a Resource Based Economy is that most of us (especially Americans) think of ourselves as Consumers.

Consumers ask the question, “Where can I get the money to buy the stuff I want and need?”

Creators ask the question, “Do I have the resources to create this?”

If we see ourselves as Consumers, then the process of creating often boils down to, “Where do we get the money to buy the stuff we need to create what we want?” This unfortunate process detracts from the creative process, and can leave us feeling frustrated and empty.

In a lecture on TED Talks, Daniel Pink explains how financial incentives interfere with the creative process. (The video is embeded on website here: http://www.metaphysics-for-life.com/mind-on-money.html) Money motivates action that requires no problem solving or creative thinking. And yet, money is considered the primary source of motivation in our economy!

Before we can successfully move from a money based to a Resource Based economy, we must begin to redefine ourselves – to make the quantum leap from seeing ourselves as Consumers, to seeing ourselves as the Creators we truly are.

Economies do not run on money. Economies run on people! We can have an economy without dollars, trade, barter or exchange. We can create a society that is fueled by the creative genius within each and every one of us – that creative genius that is crushed by financial incentives.

The key word is “CREATE”. To create the peaceful, abundant, healthy, and FUN world we all want – start seeing yourself as CREATOR!

Note: Please share your experiences with creating and consuming, and how those two experiences have impacted your own personal “economy” (ie. how rich do you really feel?)

Critics fret that health care reform would undermine American family values, not least by convening somber death panels to wheel away Grandma as if she were Old Yeller.

But peel away the emotions and fearmongering, and in fact it is the existing system that unnecessarily takes lives and breaks apart families.

My friend M. – you’ll understand in a moment why she’s terrified of my using her name – had to make a searing decision a year ago. She was married to a sweet, gentle man whom she loved, but who had become increasingly absent-minded. Finally, he was diagnosed with early-onset dementia.

The disease is degenerative, and he will become steadily less able to care for himself. At some point, as his medical needs multiply, he will probably need to be institutionalized.

The hospital arranged a conference call with a social worker, who outlined how the dementia and its financial toll on the family would progress, and then added, out of the blue: ‘Maybe you should divorce.”

‘I was blown away,” M. told me. But, she said, the hospital staff members explained that they had seen it all before, many times. If M.’s husband required long-term care, the costs would be catastrophic even for a middle-class family with savings.

Eventually, after the expenses whittled away their combined assets, her husband could go on Medicaid – but by then their children’s nest egg would be gone, along with her 401(k) plan. She would face a bleak retirement with neither her husband nor her savings.

A complicating factor was that this was a second marriage. M.’s first husband had died, leaving an inheritance that he had intended for their children. She and her second husband had a prenuptial agreement, but that would not protect her assets from his medical expenses.

The hospital told M. not to waste time in dissolving the marriage. For five years after any divorce, her assets could be seized – precisely because the government knows that people sometimes divorce husbands or wives to escape their medical bills.

‘How could I divorce him? I loved him,” she told me.

‘I explored a lot of options with an attorney here in town,” she added. ‘The attorney said, ‘I don’t see any other options for you.’ It took about a year for me to do the divorce, it was so hard.”

So M. divorced the man she loves. I asked him what he thought of this. He can still speak, albeit not always coherently, and he paused a long, long time. All he could manage was: ‘It’s hard to say.”

Long-term care constitutes a difficult and expensive challenge in any health system. But the American patchwork, full of cracks through which people fall, has a special problem with medical expenses of all kinds bankrupting couples.

A study reported in The American Journal of Medicine this month found that 62 percent of American bankruptcies are linked to medical bills. These medical bankruptcies had increased nearly 50 percent in just six years. Astonishingly, 78 percent of these people actually had health insurance, but the gaps and inadequacies left them unprotected when they were hit by devastating bills.

M. still helps her husband and, quietly, continues to live with him and care for him. But she worries that the authorities will come after her if they realize that they divorced not because of irreconcilable differences but because of irreconcilable medical bills. There were awkward questions from friends who saw the divorce announcement in the newspaper.

‘It’s just crazy,” she said. ‘It twists people like pretzels.”

The existing system doesn’t just break up families, it also costs lives. A 2004 study by the Institute of Medicine, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences, found that lack of health insurance causes 18,000 unnecessary deaths a year. That’s one person slipping through the cracks and dying every half an hour.

In short, it’s a good bet that our existing dysfunctional health system knocks off far more people than an army of ‘death panels” could – even if they existed, worked 24/7 and got around in a fleet of black helicopters.

So, for those of you inclined to believe the worst about President Obama, think it through. Suppose he is indeed a secret, foreign-born Muslim agent who is scheming to undermine American family values while killing off as many grandmothers as possible.

If all that were true, why on earth would he be trying so hard to reform our health care system? We already know how to prod families into divorce and take a life unnecessarily every 30 minutes – all we need to do is reject reform and stick with exactly what we have.